Windows – Keyboard Shortcut to Swap Mouse Buttons

autohotkeyautoitkeyboard shortcutsmousewindows

I use my mouse with both hands and like to switch back and forth for comfort reasons. However, this is made difficult by needing to go through about a zillion layers of menus to swap the buttons each time. Is there an easy way to create a single keyboard shortcut that would swap my left and right mouse button?

Edit: My OS is Windows 7.

Best Answer

As blsub6 mentioned, you can change a registry value (with a command called from a batch file):

REG ADD "HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse" /t REG_SZ /v SwapMouseButtons /d 1 /f

or

REG ADD "HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse" /t REG_SZ /v SwapMouseButtons /d 0 /f

However, you need to logout before it will take effect.

The better solution is to make a tiny .exe with C# to swap the setting, as described in the answers to this question.

Make a text file which you can call swapmouse.cs, containing this:

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System;

class SwapMouse
{
    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    public static extern Int32 SwapMouseButton(Int32 bSwap);

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        int rightButtonIsAlreadyPrimary = SwapMouseButton(1);
        if (rightButtonIsAlreadyPrimary != 0)
        {
            SwapMouseButton(0);  // Make the left mousebutton primary
        }
    }
}

And compile it to swapmouse.exe with this command:

"%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v3.5\csc" swapmouse.cs

In more recent versions of .NET you may need to add /out:swapmouse.exe and /target:exe :

"[%SystemRoot%]\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\[version]\csc" /out:swapmouse.exe /target:exe swapmouse.cs

Then you just double-click that exe to swap the mouse buttons. It takes effect immediately.

Or, as rad mentions, you can create a shortcut, and define a keyboard shortcut/hotkey in the Shortcut tab of it's Properties.

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